Cool sports

If you think skating, skiing and curling are snow and ice sports, guess again. They're all water sports. When you skate, you're really travelling on a thin film of water. The weight of your body presses down on the ice and causes the ice underneath your blades to melt, making the surface extremely slippery. On bitterly cold days, you'll have a harder time skating outdoors because the pressure of the skates can't melt the ice.
Yes, skiing on snow is a water sport, too. The snow is melted by the friction (rubbing) of your skis. On cold days, there isn't enough friction to melt the snow underneath wooden skis, so that's why you have to wax them to make them slide better.
Ever wonder why curlers sweep the ice so hard in front of the rocks thrown by their team-mates? They're making the ice melt to form a thin film of water, so the rocks will slide farther.

The future

Water supply is one of the most important factors controlling the colonization of desert areas. Scientists have recently rediscovered an old method of obtaining water using rocks. In this remarkable method, stones are piled into a pyramid shape, forming a structure called an aerial well. It works best in areas that experience a wide fluctuation in temperature with hot days and cold nights. In the daytime the stones warm up slowly, but at night when the temperature drops they lose much of the heat and become cooler than the surrounding air. The stones in the middle remain cool even on the hottest days. Even dry air contains a small amount of water vapor, so at night when warm air passes over the cooler stones the vapor in the air condenses. This water can then be collected. Using these devices, enough moisture could be captured from the dry air to supply water to a small community. The ancient Greek city of Feodosiya, now in the Ukraine, had a water supply system consisting of 13 aerial wells, each nearly 14 meters (about 46 ft.) tall. Scientists estimate that the system could have produced as much as 20,000 liters (6,760 gal.) of water a day.